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City Beautiful Movement
The City Beautiful Movement was a reform philosophy of North Americanarchitecture and urban planning that flourished during the 1890s and 1900s with the intent of introducing beautification and monumental grandeur in cities. The movement, which was originally associated mainly with Chicago,Cleveland, Detroit, and Washington, D.C. promoted beauty not only for its own sake, but also to create moral and civic virtue among urban populations.1Advocates of the philosophy believed that such beautification could thus promote a harmonious social order that would increase the quality of life, while critics would complain that the movement was overly concerned with aesthetics at the expense of social reform; Jane Jacobs referred to the movement as an "architectural design cult".2 Origins and effectedit The movement began in the United States in response to crowding in tenement districts, a consequence of high birth rates, increasedimmigration and consolidation of rural populations into cities. The movement flourished for several decades, and in addition to the construction of monuments, it also achieved great influence in urban planning that endured throughout the 20th century, in particular in regard to the later creation of housing projects in the United States. The "Garden City" movement in Britain influenced the contemporary planning of some newer suburbs of London, and there was cross-influence between the two aesthetics, one based in formal garden plans and urbanization schemes and the other, with its "semi-detached villas" evoking a more rural atmosphere. Architectural idiomsedit The particular architectural style of the movement borrowed mainly from the contemporary Beaux-Arts and neoclassical architectures, which emphasized the necessity of order, dignity, and harmony. World's Columbian Expositionedit The first large-scale elaboration of the City Beautiful occurred during the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago. The planning of the exposition was directed by architect Daniel Burnham, who hired architects from the eastern United States, as well as the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, to build large-scale Beaux-Arts monuments that were vaguely classical with uniform cornice height. The exposition displayed a model city of grand scale, known as the "White City", with modern transport systems and no poverty visible. The exposition is credited with resulting in the large-scale adoption of monumentalism for American architecture for the next 15 years. Richmond, Virginia's Monument Avenueis one expression of this initial phase. Louisiana Purchase Expositionedit The popularization begun by the World Columbian Exposition was increased by the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in 1904 and the commissioner of architects selected Franco-American architect Emmanuel Louis Masqueray to be Chief of Design of the fair. In this position, which Masqueray held for three years, he designed the following fair buildings in the prevailing Beaux Arts mode: the Palace of Agriculture; the cascades and colonnades; the Palace of Forestry, Fish, and Game; the Palace of Horticulture; and the Palace of Transportation; all of which were widely emulated in civic projects across the United States. Masqueray resigned soon after the fair opened in 1904, having been invited by Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul to Minnesota to design a new cathedral for the city in the fair's Beaux Arts style. Other celebrated architects of the fair's buildings, notably Cass Gilbert, who designed the Saint Louis Art Museum, originally the fair's Palace of the Fine Arts, similarly employed City Beautiful ideas from the fair throughout their lives. Axial plan of The Mall, Washington, D.C.: the Reflecting Pool and Lincoln Memorial extend the central axis McMillan Planedit Main article: McMillan Plan An early use of the City Beautiful ideal with intent of creating social order through beautification was the McMillan Plan, (1902) named for the Michigan Senator James McMillan, which developed from the Senate Park Commission's redesigning of the monumental core of Washington, D.C. to commemorate the city's centennial and to fulfill unrealized aspects of the city plan of Pierre Charles L'Enfant a century earlier. The Washington planners, who included Burnham, Saint-Gaudens, Charles McKim ofMcKim, Mead, and White, and Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., visited many of the great cities of Europe with the intent of making Washington monumental and gardened like the European capitals of the era and creating a sense of the legitimacy of government during a time of social disturbance in the United States. The essence of the plan surrounded theUnited States Capitol with monumental government buildings to replace "notorious slumcommunities". At the heart of the design was the creation of the National Mall and eventually included Burnham's Union Station. The implementation of the plan was interrupted by World War I but resumed after the war, culminating in the construction of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922.